The Audio Belle At AXPONA 2023 | Show Report
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
- Cynthia Blankenship, AKA, The Audio Belle, takes us on her personal journey, including her insights, discoveries, and thoughts on AXPONA 2023.
About Cynthia Blankenship:
Cynthia converted to audiophilism 5 years ago when she first heard a pair of Magnepan 3.3Rs playing Die Moldau from Smetana's Ma Vlast. The ensuing journey would have her be a recurring guest on the Audiophiliac's channel, a Magnepan 1.7i ad in The Absolute Sound magazine, and shadowing Alan Sircom of hi-fi+. With what began as a hobby with a focus on human interest stories, 5 years later she will now be delving into the world of audio gear reviews for The Absolute Sound, HiFi+, and her own channel @TheAudioBelle
What Is The Absolute Sound?
The Absolute Sound magazine has been a leading publication in high-end audio since 1972. Since the early 2000s, The Absolute Sound has expanded to include web, newsletter, digital magazine, social media, UA-cam and Substack platforms. The Absolute Sound platforms have a global audience of over 500,000 audiophiles.
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It is so refreshing to see younger individuals involved in high end audio, and I am looking forward to your unique perspective, your journey and contributions to the Abs. Sound. Glad you seem comfortable mixing with the Gen-X and Boomer audiophiles...and even Wendell's generation....since so many of us "audiophiles" are from those generations. Having those cross-generational friendships and connections benefits all involved. Looking forward to more! All my best.
Cynthia , It was nice to see Jeremy and you again
Great job on the video .
Good luck in your new adventure with Absolute Sound.
@davidthomas1810,
Was wonderful seeing you and Brian again as well, David! Thank you for the wishes. We hope to get a chance to run around with you two at the next show as well!
---Cynthia, The Audio Belle
Thoroughly enjoyed your reporting and good to see you back on the job.I hope your presentations and reviews will encourage more women’s interest in the field so it’s just not a guy thing. It’s not motorcycles or hot rods. After all, we all love music and it’s about the ability to appreciate it more.
Both different and interesting. A welcome perspective on audio shows. Thank you.
OK, negative feedback is when some of the output of a circuit is fed back to the input to correct for distortions. This can be local, one stage at a time, or the overall amp out fed back to the input stages. One problem is because it comes from the stage's output, the initial signal/ transient has already gone through that circuit and the feed back is to compensate if it was repeating. IOW used to get good specs with steady state sine waves. Designing a stage to be stable and low distortion in and of itself takes more work and costs. So he promotes it.
Plus if the negative feedback loops get outside signals injected, say the counter EMF from speakers injected into the Damping Factor feedback loops in an amp output. Thus why amps with extreme high damping factors tend to not sound as good. Another lesson some time.
Thanks, you saved me time of Explaining.
"like throwing a piece of cheese out for some mice" - yes, very much so!
Question - the reviews I have watched about the show, 2023, are all about the speakers there. How does a reviewer distinguish the sound of the speaker from the system/components driving it: amps, pre amp, cables, source player, etc.?
Cables at very least change tone. Even 2 different black power cords with bring out different tones. (Try it!)
There is a point where your gear will be bottle necked by cheap RCA’s. I have Focals sopra 3s. My last buy was a $6k speaker cable. It was instantly jaw dropping. It’s sad that you have to spend the same amount on cables as you do speakers.
Great video. Thank you. Very well presented and honest. So many other reviewers either hype things up or talk in flowery terms that have no meaning. Keep being yourself. It's refreshing
Enjoyed your Axpona Report & Enjoyed your perspective. Well done! Got to be cool to be in the mix at The Absolute Sound.
You mentioned at around 8 min. mark you would welcome comments on nicer cables upgrades. I have no Magnan Cables experience, but do have with Kimber and many others.
No doubt if you have a decent system (even a $1500 or so rig) you will hear a difference with between base off the shelf and purpose built cables. More clarity, or better defined bass...etc.,etc.,etc.
I was a sceptic until my friend made me try some interconnects about 30yrs ago, and that was that. They were $50, which sounded crazy high at the time- but made immediate improvements over the standard RCA's I was using. Since then I have used quality cables throughout my systems. Bottom line...cables make a difference for sure- but no need to go crazy. Stay in line with the system you have cost-wise. I use Nordost and Kimber...but most major brands are high quality. Shout out to "your man" on video too🙂
Wow Cynthia. I am blown away. You have really upped your game in such a magnificent way. So Professional and so insightful. What a fabulous and refreshing video. I really enjoyed it. My fav of all the Axpona vids this year. I hope you will forgive this small indulgence but I just have to say that you are looking quite amazing to boot. So happy for you! ❤
@discustank,
Thank you so, so much. And don't worry, you are forgiven. 😂 By the way, I still have it on my list to try out Qobuz with Roon per your recommendation.
---Cynthia, The Audio Belle
Love it, Cynthia. Really enjoyed this. Congrats on becoming a reporter for The Absolute Sound - a brilliant move on their part. 'Audiophile speed dating'...now that made me chuckle. Thank you👍❤️👍
I'm an electrical engineer and a music lover. I don't consider myself an audiophile anymore. I haven't for 49 years when I went in my own direction. My main interest is in classical music.
I give you whatever information you want to know from an engineer's perspective. Since you asked about negative feedback I'll start there. I will try to simplify a very complex idea. Negative feedback is a method electrical engineers use to reduce distortion and increase frequency response. When I took the course in 1968 as a senior in engineering school the first thing the professor said is that this is the most important development in electrical engineering since the second world war. A lot has happened since 1968 but this is still up there with many other important developments since. To give you an idea about how complicated it really is the textbook we used was written by two air force generals and was targeted at seniors and masters degree candidates in electrical engineering. The textbook has more calculus in it than a calculus textbook so it is not for tyros. It's a very powerful tool that can do a lot of harm used improperly as well as a lot of good when used correctly.
Here's a simple example in everyday life to give you an idea of how the concept works. When you learn to drive a car, you learn that if you want to change the direction you learn to turn the steering wheel. You learn by watching the road and learn how much turning the wheel changes direction. You might oversteer and turn too far. You might understeer and not turn far enough. Eventually you learn "the feel" of the car so that you know how far to turn the wheel to get the car going in the direction you want to turn. You turning the wheel is the forward gain and you seeing the results is the reverse gain. So you learn exactly how much to turn the wheel to go in a different direction. Overall it's called the loop gain. But there's a kicker. At an amusement park there are bumper car rides. You turn the wheel and nothing happens right away. It's not like a regular car, There's a lag. So you turn it some more and you inadvertently oversteer. The same happens when steering a large ship, there's a time lag. If you really screw up and you turn the wheel hard the opposite way to avoid oversteering you go in exactly the opposite direction you intended. What you're doing is 180 degrees out of phase from what you wanted.
How does this apply to negative feedback in amplifiers. There's a type of amplifier stage called a differential or difference amplifier. The input from the previous stage is applied to the + input. A portion of the output at a later stage is applied to the minus input. Since the output is greater than the input it must be scaled back to be just the right amount. This goes into the - input. The amplifier is now driven by the difference between them, that is the negative has the inverse of the distortion so that component is cancelled out. It is subtracted from the input of the differential amplifier. The amplifier sums the two out of phase cancelling out only the distortion. Too little feedback and not all the distortion is cancelled out. Too much and it starts adding more back in. As frequency increases the time delay of the feedback signal becomes increasingly important. If the loop gain is 1 or more when the phase of the feedback signal is 180 degrees out of phase with the + input signal it adds instead of subtracts. Then you have built an oscillator. So if you don't understand what you are doing you are creating more problems than you solve. You can also create more distortion than you started out with if the reverse signal is too great.
Like any powerful tool you can do good or bad. You can use a power saw to build a house or to cut your hand off. Those who don't know what they are doing are better off not monkeying around with something they don't understand.
I really appreciate that Cynthia did not try to impress with "audiophile speak" but used down to earth language and frank impressions of what she heard. Thank You.
Will be looking for the Wendell video? I have not heard them, but supposedly the Alsyvox panel speakers and the Clarisys panel speakers also do low frequencies better than Magnepan. Both the prior companies use magnetic fields much stronger than Magnepan, but that means higher cost (for the Neodymium magnets.)
Speakers as affordable as Magapan's topline models (after the recent price increase)...GT Audio Works Reference 3
no negative feedback is a bit complicated but in the bottom line the amp is more responsive this way and to my opinion it's a more audiophile, more pure and direct way to design a circuit ,with less filters.
The microphone works works great at 22:48. Alex's voice is wonderful. Why no audio sound?
Wow Cynthia. One of the best you’ve put out. Nice job.
Great job and a refreshing take!
If you want to learn about cables and how/ if they work or are snake oil, you have to move out of the audio world into physics. My degree in Electronics told me snake oil. But now with a fairly recent youtube video/ challenge in physics, it blew up how and how fast information travels across wires. Not just the current needed to drive a load. But the information controlling the current. Also dielectrics affecting that data flow,.... Here is one of the youtubes involved. It started quite the youtube battle.
ua-cam.com/users/results?search_query=how+current+flows+through+wires+turn+light+on
"into physics" - more like psychoacoustics. Different cables will have different physical attributes. That is not in doubt. The question is whether those differences can be perceived by humans. (And yes, sometimes they can be, at other times they cannot be.)
Regarding the Veritasium videos: they made a big splash because most people learn in high school physics about wires and current, but in later physics courses it is clear that the energy is nearly all carried by the EM field (that extends away from the physical carrier.) So many people who have not learned about how conductors actually work got (and still are) confused.
@@TheDanEdwards Nope. Pure physics. By getting past the snake oil level of VooDoo marketing materials and into actual physical laws. Yes the Veritasium and other videos of that discussion were quite the splash. About as big as the MOFI DSD vinyl blowup. But less financial impact? But there were some very interesting ones earlier and separate from it. One of the first I ran across that started making cable sense....
Circuit Energy doesn't FLOW the way you THINK! ua-cam.com/video/C7tQJ42nGno/v-deo.html
Audio Belle- You are the nicest person to come along in the hifi realm. Keep up the great coverage!
She's nice, but nicer than Peter Breuninger and OCD Mikey??
I don't think so!
Kimber Kable suck they make the system sound way too bright
Beauty and the Beasts
You should look at some of the R2R ladder Dacs, it's amazing the sound you can get for the money nowadays, a bit like Chi Fi gear. My favourite is the Ladder Schuman👍
My favorite song lyrics like evahhh is, "Jeremy spoke in cla-assss again...."
Man I love that song
Wished I had spotted you to say hello =)
You never made it back to Diptyque?
That Michael guy is cute
Audio speed date. 😂
Congrats
Since you asked....No, the cables don't make an audible difference. But when auditioned without a time synchronized quick switching comparison audiophiles will inevitably perceive a difference where no difference in the sound exists.